A night of the Athertons

Saturday night at the Cultural Centre was special. The pieces featured in the first part of the progamme are not those one would normally hear: Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Benjamin Britten's orchestral and vocal rendition of 9 poems by the Parnassian French poet Arthur Rimbaud under the general title Les Illuminations. The concert was special also in that it celebrated the achievement of two Athertons, not as father and daughter but parters in music. The father, David Atherton, the Musical director of the HKPO 1989-2000 was the baton at the rostrum and the daughter Elizabeth Atherton a voice singing the Rimbaud's Illuminations in French. 

It is really the first time I heard Stravinsky Symphonies of Wind Instruments. It was a demonstration of the skills of our wind instrument players. It was a rather idiosyncratic experimental piece, completed at the end of November 1920 as part of a "Debussy Memorial" to commeorate the death of  Claude Debussy, one of the heroes of the Impressionist movement in music, a year ago by the French magazine La Revue Musicale in 1920 and revised in 1947 .The piece has been described as juxtaposition of a number of carillons, litanies, pastorals and processional. In this piece we hear the various sections of the wind playing together with a theme borrowd by Britten from a Russian folk melodies. It's a rather odd piece. It is more interesting as sound rather than for musicality which however was never what Benjamin decided in the first place It was played with three flutes, alto flute, two oboes, cor anglais, three bassoons and four horns, three trumpets and an equal number of trombones and a tuba. A Russian folk song motif was repeated by successive sections of the wind ensemble. It is not completely without melody. To me, it sounds more like an experiment in exploring the sonic qualities of different groups of wind instruments. But certainly, it is not the kind of music people whose ears are accustomed by long habits to the romantic style of music would expect. 

The next section was again a rather special type of music. It is again fairly "experimental" in that it calls for a style of singing very different from the coloratura style of singing. It consists of 9 poems in sung in French. The poems formed part of those in the collections called Les Illuminations written by one of my favourite poets Arthur Rimbaud: Fanfare, Villes, Phrase, Antique, Royauté, Marine, Interlude, Being Beauteous, Parade, Départ. Of course, the full poem is much longer and consists of many more parts or fragments. Rimbaud was a precocious poet who was not afraid to blaze a trail to a new way of writing poetry breaking all the strict conventions of French classical poetry, writing in a free flowing style and with an ear for the musical qualities of the sound of the words he uses. After he thought he had said all that he wanted to say, he abandoned poetry and plunged into life as a French soldier! Because of the musical qualities of his use of words, Benjamin Britten thought of further adapting them as materials of his songs. The Illumnations describes various phenemona in French society but give them a completely different context and emotional tones, mixing elements of reality and imagination, fables and facts, man and nature to produce a magical world of beauty. I do not know what others think. To me, Britten seems to be exploring in these little "chansons" a different kind of song, forceful but not rigid, steady but not staid, with plenty of sound in the high registers but coming down fairly rapidly to the bass depending on the context. It's a rather odd mix of fact and fiction, poetry and prose, the magical and the mundane, word and music. Elizabeth Atherton brings it out very well. She has got a very powerful and versatile voice quite suited to what she is doing.

The second half of the programme was Act II of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, Op 71. This is one of the earliest classical musical pieces I heard from that storeroom of the drugstore below my childhood flat. I liked it then. I still like it now. There is a kind of joie de vivre and playfulness in the music which is most appealing but there are no lack of bombasts as well. But maybe, my mind had already been preconditioned by other versions of the music played by other orchestras and other conductors which I had previously heard. I found that the soft passages were not soft and delicate enough so that the dynamic contrasts were not as great as I think they could have been. I seldom criticize the HKPO but I honestly thought they could have played this piece much better. Perhaps they were not yet in full form after the Christmas vacation? But overall, I have little complaints.